Frada Kaplan introduced her friend Mark Chain who became an NVMUG member. Another new member, Michail Marks, joined us for his first NVMUG meeting.

Someone broke into Midge’s house and stole Richard’s laptop which was behind a pillow, and ignored her laptop which was in plain sight. His laptop had all their financial accounts on it. They bought him a new 13 inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Midge brought it in to show the Retina display. She wasn’t able to show pictures on the display because all their photos are on Midge’s MacBook.

Frada Kaplan asked for help in adding a new font to her Print Shop application. Mark Chain helped her find the font she wanted where they could download it for free. The instructions were to use the Fonts Book Application in her main Applications folder. Geof Gonter showed where the Fonts Book applications was. Stephen Farber helped install the font. It still did not show in Print Shop until she restarted Print Shop.

Geof Gonter showed us how to launch your Disk Utility App within Applications > Utilities and then use it to verify your permissions. If it says there are any problems, you click Repair Permissions, and it repairs them.

Then he said if you use it to Verify the hard disk it will display any problems in red. To our surprise, it displayed problems like this:

Disk Utility cannot repair the hard drive that it is on. On older Macs you get the Installer CD, and reboot from it.

On Mountain Lion you restart holding down the Command-R keys to bring up the RecoveryDiskAssistant where you select a different Disk Utility and can click Repair Disk. (I was just checking to be sure I understood what Geof said, and to my surprise my MacBook Air had a disk problem that needed repairing and provided the above illustration. )

So we clicked Repair Disk and it repaired our hard drives OK.

If you do not have the recovery system on your computer’s hard drive, Command-R will go to the Apple web site for it. Geof explained how to use the T key with a firewire connection to repair other computers, and told us much more about other OS X systems.

Geof advised Bruce Shields on removing the screen to make repairs on a 16 year old iMac, being careful not to pull off the camera..

Geof’a MacBook is 3 ½ years old, and he just upgraded it to 8 gigs on a faster drive. He will run a copy of OS X 10.6.8 in one partition because systems 10.7 and 1o.8 don’t run Rosetta and can’t run AppleWorks and other older software. He will run Mountain Lion in the other partition. He needs this for his work with schools which use a mix of older and newer Macs.

Bruce Shields works with both Mac and DOS computers in his officer. He despises Microsoft Word. He has a new Del computer there and nobody can open his new Word files. Geof said this is a function of the new Office which is supposed to open, but has problems. Geof said Power Point presentations become corrupt one out of ten times. To solve this problem, Geof opens the Power Point presentations in Keynote. and can then save them as good Power Point files.

Broad Band usually refers to 1 meg per second or better. Mark Chain used to have only dial up with Fairpoint until they ran a new broadband cable and he now has 7 megs. Geof said it is probably a new copper wire, fiber optic cable is rare except for schools.

Mark’s battery is saying, “Service.” Geof told him to get a new battery. Then Geof had Mark look up the cycle count in About This Mac. It said 192 cycles since 2005. Geof said something was wrong and advised him to contact Apple with his serial number to see if his MacBook was on a recall.

Michael Marks has lots of experience with PCs, likes to tinker with the operating system, and has made some of his own changes. He likes some of the things in DOS better so far. He prefers the PC for working with pictures. He said where the Mac excels is Command-Tab to quite applications and switch between open applications.

Michael Marks

Geof said he cut his eye teeth on a PC. He has a PC at home used as a boat anchor, to store music, and to test stuff.

Frada needs a different printer that will connect to her MacBook. Geof recommended using OmniPrint or AirPrint.

Bruce said he refilled printer cartridges for 25 years, but no one refills cartridges anymore. Geof said Cosco will refill HP print cartridges while you are there shopping. Stephen Farber said that new cartridges have a counter that estimates how much ink is left. His printer goes through the yellows. He said new cartridges have an air blotter to keep the right regulated pressure and cannot be refilled.

Michael mentioned that pdf print preview displayed when you print if your printer supports it. Bruce said their is a view shown when you print in Pages. What you see is what you get. Pages will also show invisibles. And, you can adjust the spaces between characters in Pages.

Midge uses Office at work. She uses Word a lot but it is much more work than Pages. Using Publisher to send a pdg, it will only send whatever page that is showing. Midge could not make it print the whole report. She said people in her office were redoing similar documents instead of keeping templates and modifying them (as you would in Pages). Midge is now the computer person in her office. She said, “Now that is frightening.”

Midge Lubot and Kelly Gonter sharing something.

At this point the meeting dissolved into several lively small groups. They were going to good to interrupt.

Geof bought the group back together when he showed a video that Kelly had taken on her iPhone of the strange antics of her cat each night when they go to bed.

Kelly Gonter’s cat coming when Geof called.

The Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital provides our meeting room as a public educational service. In appreciation, each month we hold a raffle, and/or accept voluntary donations for the hospital auxiliary.

O’Reilly has been one of our major sources of books used in the raffles. O’Reilly now has new program which provides Macintosh User Groups eBooks for special meetings and raffles. The winner of the eBook registers with O’Reilly and selects an eBook from their huge list of publications, limit one ebook per person.

This month’s raffle included the choice of an eBook from OReilly from this new program.

Midge Lubot was the first winner in this month’s raffle and chose the free ebook from O’Reilly.

Mark Chain was the second and third raffle winner and chose the two good, but not new, books: Head First Word Press, a Brain Friendly Guide by Jeff Siarto from O'Reilly and Mac OS X Lion, Peachpit Learning Series by Robin Williams with John Tollett from Peachpit.

I announced that I had my 83rd birthday. I will not be reviewing as many books to earn them for the raffles, and hope that the O’Reilly program will help. Kelly Gonter said she had her birthday two weeks after mine, but she is many years younger.

As an NVMUG member you are eligible for discounts from O’Reilly. Enter the discount code near the completion of your order and the discount will show in the reduced price.

This is a general Mac user group discount code for all O’Reilly books: